People ask me questions sometimes. Normally it’s stuff like “What are you doing rummaging through my dumpster” or “Hey, didn’t I tell you never to come back here,” but occasionally I am asked about the process of creating a cartoon. Many people who can’t draw view it as a sort of magical activity. People who are able to crank out 2,000-word essays on a regular basis are reduced to a state of childlike wonder as they watch someone generate an image from a few lines. Because more people can write than draw, the cartoonist’s status as a diviner of objects into two dimensions is retained. This is why cartoonists are routinely paid seven-figure signing bonuses out of college and thus able to afford the trappings of celebrity, such as severe opiate addiction and leaked hotel tapes.
But drawing a cartoon is very much like writing an essay. Both require planning and revision. This is my process.
Step 1) Writing. The most frequent question you are asked as a cartoonist is “Where do you get your ideas?” I like to give different answers to this question, because the truth is really quite boring. It all starts with a blank page in your trusty sketchbook.
Here, random phrases are written down. Small figures are drawn. Half-baked ideas are discarded. I read the newspaper and check my Google Reader constantly in order to pick potential topics. Generally I try to do something UGA-related, but generally there’s nothing interesting happening at UGA, forcing me to draw elephants and donkeys mugging a crying Statue of Liberty and holding big sacks marked “Taxpayer $$$.”
Step 2) Thumbnail. Because I am impatient and have a short attention span I do not generally like to do a lot of preliminary work. I like to knock it out. But a thumbnail or two to get the composition down is generally quite helpful, if only because it forces me to go ahead and find a solution early on.
In this stage, I don’t put in any more details than are necessary. I just block out where all the elements should go.
Step 3) Pencil. This is the full-size rough, also done in my sketchbook. Here I mess around with the composition a bit more and refine the details.
As you can tell, I changed up the angle from the thumbnail in order to give Mike Adams a bit more sneakiness and be the focus of the viewer’s attention.
Step 4) Transferring to bristol board. This is something I adopted from my graphic design classes recently. It involves going over the rough with a hard point on top of a sheet of tracing paper coated with conte crayon, which transfers the image onto the board in crayon.
I have come to prefer this method to penciling on the board directly because it doesn’t alter the surface the way pencil and eraser do, optimizing it for inking.
Step 5) Inking the cartoon. I use matte black waterproof ink and a round sable brush for linework, a Rapidograph for lettering and a Hunt 102 quill pen for details. It is a very Stone Age method.
Step 6) Scan it and send it.
But it is important to remember that like every writer, every cartoonist eventually evolves to have his own highly idiosyncratic method. For example, I often wonder how my system would change were I to quit my crystal meth habit. But that’s another blog post.
